alt Hacker NewsThis is fun. Of course this problem is also a fun way to consider an upper bound on the total number of board states and therefore how hard it is to 'solve' chess compared to a game like checkers. Hitting the calculator 26 bytes works out to chess being no more than 4.113761393×10⁶² possible states. I'll start my GPU solving that right now!
[edit] This made me look for articles estimating this and I found this one [1] which confirms the above is in the right ballpark. Actual study (according to the article) says 4.822 x10^44 is their upper bounds
[1] https://chess-grandmaster.com/how-many-possible-chess-positi...
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Wondering if there's a typo or I misunderstand something, but isn't one of these 10^18 bigger than the other? That would be a pretty big ballpark.
> a fun way to consider an upper bound on the total number of board states and therefore how hard it is to 'solve' chess compared to a game like checkers
That and therefore doesn’t follow. As a counterexample, consider a NIM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim) game starting with a googolplex number of piles of size 1. That has way more board states than chess or go, but is easily solved, as the game is trivial.